What is Travel Portfolio Planning?
Travel Portfolio Planning is Anthology Travel’s signature offer.
While I’m delighted to help clients plan a honeymoon, an anniversary trip, or another one-off trip, my true passion lies in combining a client’s dream wishlist with my inside industry knowledge and stellar project management to create a 2-5 year plan of trips they can’t wait to take.
Who’s the right travel for Travel Portfolio Planning?
It’s definitely not for everyone; because the intention of this offering is to create a long-term advisory relationship between myself and the client, this is the type of client that Travel Portfolio Planning works best for:
Someone who is either currently an avid traveler or aspires to make travel a more important part of their life.
Someone who is comfortable sharing personal details with me - it’s a relationship with a lot of trust on both sides; the clients are entrusting me with deep knowledge about them, and I’m in turn trusting that they won’t abuse the “unlimited advice” aspect of the relationship and will be lovely to work closely with.
Generally, someone who is either currently in or about to enter into a transitory period in their life. For example, this type of planning is especially valuable for:
Families - knowing you have a finite number of years to explore the world with your kids creates an ideal opportunity to plan out what, exactly, you want them to experience with you - as well as what trips might be better off taken as a couple. Pricing can factor in, as well - for safari, for instance, a lot of camps will charge a 50% rate for kids under 12, which can lead to substantial cost savings if we can plan those well in advance.
Recent retirees or those looking ahead to retirement - not only is your income shifting but your schedule and time availability changes dramatically upon retirement. Anticipated changes in health and mobility can also play a role in longer-term travel planning; maybe there are certain kinds of trips you want to experience earlier in retirement (climbing Machu Picchu, exploring Antarctica, trekking in Nepal) and those you’re okay holding off on a bit.
Those about to undergo a substantial professional change - for example, clients who are about to or who have recently made partner at law or consulting firms, the financial picture changes for you but scheduling also becomes more difficult. We can talk about the kinds of trips you can plan a year or more out, to ensure you’re able to stake a claim to being out of the office on those dates, and also talk about shorter trips that we might be able to spin up at short notice if your work schedule shifts a bit and a long weekend becomes available.
My professional background pre-travel was at the DC office of a global law firm, and my personal circle is filled with partners at law firms and consulting firms, so this is an area I understand extremely well. If that’s you, I have a thorough understanding of how the demands on your time and the cadence of your work affect how, when, and even where you can travel.
People in this category can also benefit from some advance travel planning pre-partnership; i.e., during the “on deck” cycle, there may be times where a pre-planned retreat can be helpful to get into the needed mindset or to find some quiet time to prepare for the next hurdle.
This type of planning is also valuable for clients concerned about mental and physical well-being: ensuring you have regularly-scheduled times away from work and the demands of your day-to-day life can help you regulate, check in with yourself, and get professional guidance on issues both mental and physical. Wellness is one of my passions, and I have a wide range of wellness-oriented travel opportunities to discuss with clients interested in making that a focal point. I recommend quarterly wellness weekends when possible, and semi-annual at a minimum.
So how does it work?
I don’t want to put any clients on blast here, so I’m going to use myself and my husband as an example here.
Before we started planning with an eye to the long-term, our travel “planning” was relatively haphazard: we focused on cities like Paris, Tokyo, and Madrid. I did a lot of shopping, he did a lot of drinking cocktails while I shopped, we both did a lot of walking and exploring. And those trips were lovely! But there wasn’t anything intentional about the planning.
Once we started thinking about planning more intentionally, the following happened:
We gained a lot of clarity about the kinds of experiences we like to have included in our trips. While we take plenty of straight-up beach relaxation trips to Mexico, in other destinations, we make sure to include food & wine experiences, street art tours, sporting events, and historical walking tours.
We more or less stick to our old cadence of a lot of free time for wandering and exploration, but bookended by one scheduled activity per day: that activity might be a dinner reservation, or it might be a tour. We’ve found we need a focal point to plan the rest of our time around; that keeps the overall trip from feeling haphazard and accidental.
We have a firm idea of the destinations we’re both interested in. Rather than haphazardly choosing a destination, we’ve examined:
Destinations that are a top priority for both of us (Portugal, Mexico, the UK, Japan)
Destinations we’re both interested in going but maybe not as urgently imminently (Italy, Scotland, Morocco, Scandinavia, Vietnam, Greece, France)
We have a firm idea of the types of travel that interest us both:
Independent travel
River cruises
Safari
Talking over destinations and interests in an intentional way also led us to some compromise: there are some destinations I very much want to explore for professional purposes that my husband is just not interested in (New Zealand, Australia, parts of Africa). Having the discussion about destinations led to a deeper understanding of how we can try to schedule our travel so we’re not spending too much time apart.
We’ve tentatively slated the following trips for the next few years:
Fall 2021/Winter 2022: Mexico (a perennial favorite and we have both some favorite resorts we’d like to revisit and many parts of Mexico we haven’t yet visited), Portugal (to revisit our favorite hotel on the planet and have some new experiences with a group of friends)
Late Winter/Early Spring 2022: I have some research trips to Europe in mind - low season is a great time for me to do those, since my hotel partners will have more time to visit with me, and I’ll be able see more rooms when hotels aren’t as full.
Summer 2022: Croatia (with friends) with a stopover in Venice on the way home for my husband + a deep dive research trip in Northern Italy for me
Fall 2022: Japan for Thanksgiving
We’re not locked into any of these trips, but it gives me plenty of time to examine options, ensure we’re getting the best availability and pricing, and provides a lot of time to talk those trips up to friends who might want to join us. We can adjust on the fly if we need to (ahem, 2020), and continually tweak to make sure we’re getting exactly what we need, exactly the way we want it.
Now, this amount of structure isn’t right for everyone, but for the right client, it can be the difference between either never getting around to travel/going to the same places over and over and bringing some travel dreams to reality.
How I developed this model
Candidly, I know of very few other travel advisors who work using this particular model - offhand, I can think of exactly one. A lot of travel advisors are still running very transactional businesses, rather than relational businesses, where they’re focusing on bookings rather than long-term client relationships. When I started my business, I deliberately went to a business coach outside of the industry to build the business model - I knew a completely commission-based model wasn’t for me, but didn’t have a lot of other examples to look at for ideas.
The coach and I started from the point of what kind of business I wanted to build and what kind of life I wanted to be leading; I still have the notes from that session saved on my phone so I can refer to them frequently. These are, verbatim, quotes from those notes:
“We discussed what led you to create Anthology Travel…ultimately, this was best summarized in your phrase “to live an integrated life,” which you defined as a life that took all of your passions and interests (travel, wellness, health, friendship, etc.) and integrated them in a meaningful way.”
“You passionately articulated how this business is about more than just travel for you; rather it is about helping people authentically live their best lives…you articulated how your business is about the difference between simply visiting a place and truly experiencing it.”
“You emphasized that the quality of the experience was more important than how much it costs, and emphasized that a key tenet of your business was ‘no mediocre experiences’ and ‘no wasted time’ (according to how your clients define wasted.”
NUTS & BOLTS
Because Travel Portfolio Planning is an advisory service, the planning and research costs work a little differently: these clients pay a retainer starting at $2,500 per family annually and go up from there, depending on the number of travelers and complexity of the travel schedule we’re discussing. In addition to helping you articulate your bucket list and plot those trips out on a timeline, the service includes unlimited trip planning for the year.
Travel Portfolio Planning is, and has always been, at the heart of Anthology Travel. If you think Travel Portfolio Planning might be right for you, reach out to schedule a consultation